Tealium Announces Record First Quarter Results and $20 Million in Additional Growth Financing

Are the cloud wars over? Many companies are or have choosen a marketing stack. The issue can be that whatever capabilities that marketing stack has, the CMO is stuck with. And it may be that the stack has every thing they need, but maybe it doesn’t. That may mean that a marketer ends up choosing a number of different solutions, which generally don’t talk to each other or update the customer profile. That could be a competitive disadvantage.

But what if those various marketing solutions could talk to each other and be informed by data from other systems? It could mean that those solutions could actually be more valuable. And this is the topic at hand and is on the real-time futurescape ofTealium®, the market leader in enterprise tag management and solutions who announced not only record first quarter results, but also an additional $20 million in growth financing led by Silver Lake Waterman. The funding will be used to accelerate global expansion across all business segments, including engineering, sales, customer service and marketing.

Jeff Lunsford, Tealium CEO said, “An estimated $1.5 trillion is spent annually on global marketing and communications and approximately $130 billion of this is spent on marketing technology. The rapid adoption of Tealium’s award-winning solutions can help enterprises get much higher returns from their marketing investments.” Why? It doesn’t matter which marketing clouds or point solutions companies are using, Tealium creates a data foundation that allows the marketers to control, own and act on their data stream. But wait, there’s more… The part that really caught my eye is the ability to make those applications work better together to help drive more profitable, real-time customer interactions across all digital channels.

In the age of collaboration (personal / company) for which my colleague Alan Lepofsky at Constelation is known for, the idea that software vendors could really live in an ecosystem that makes them individually and also separately more successful seems like where the future should take us. However, the competitive nature of the vendor scape has made the idea of collaboration where the individual and the collective become more valuable is not always the first thing on everyone’s mind.

My point of view is that every software solution has some sort of historical technological footprint – meaning that they started out doing one thing really well. And then as customers requested more features and functionality or engineers / developers saw new opportunities to expand the product, they added more capabilities. And as time goes by those point solutions grow into suites – either by developing their own features and functions, but also often by acquiring companies.

Now let’s look at the model of collaboration Tealium is proposing as future picture of how software vendors can become more successful. Providing software vendor collaboration to make the parts and the whole more successful is a different way to look at expanding the features, functions and capabilities as well as benefits of any one “point solution” or “software package suite.” Perhaps I grew up idealistically hoping that the world would see that when each of us wins, we all win. That was the point in the movie, A Beautiful Mind. But it’s not really how many CEOs think – yet. Perhaps this type of thinking, and the ability to execute on it, will create that shift.

Tealium’s $20 million in growth financing, led by Silver Lake Waterman, brings the total the company has raised since January 2012 to $47.5 million, with Battery Ventures and Tenaya Capital leading earlier financings. Shawn O’Neill, Managing Director and Co-Head of Silver Lake Waterman said, “We are pleased to be supporting Tealium’s global expansion efforts. Enterprises will continue to invest heavily in technologies that improve their customers’ experiences across all digital touch points, and we see Tealium as the market leader in the space.” What I like about what O’Neill said was that we may now be able to transform that customer experience. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart; as a customer advocate I’ve been writing about this topic for a good 20 years. It seems now the technology is starting to catch up with the ideals we in the customer service and customer experience world have been writing about. And do it at scale. More to come soon.

Tealium®’s Enterprise Tag Management Capabilities

If you want to catch Tealium’s social media conversations, you can find them here:

· Tealium AudienceStream, the company’s new audience segmentation and data distribution solution, was namedNew Technology of the Year by the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) as part of its Awards for Excellence Program in March.

· Recognized by Forbes Magazineas one of America’s Most Promising Companies for 2014.

I’m very curious to see how this all pans out. Will vendors see the value in using a vendor like Tealium to make their software better and create better customer experiences? Or will they go into hoarding mode and be short sited?
@DrNatalie

About Silver Lake Waterman

Silver Lake Waterman is part of Silver Lake, the global leader in technology investing with over $23 billion in combined assets under management and committed capital and a team of approximately 110 investment and value creation professionals located around the world. Silver Lake Waterman focuses on providing growth capital, via its FLEX Capital product, to later-stage growth companies in the technology and technology-enabled industries. FLEX Capital is a proprietary, hybrid instrument created by Silver Lake to provide a flexible solution for companies in the technology industry ecosystem seeking to finance expansion. For more information about Silver Lake Waterman and Silver Lake, please visit www.silverlake.com.

About Tealium

Tealium helps savvy brands bring order to marketing chaos and engage customers in innovative ways. Using Tealium as the foundation for their digital marketing operations, smart marketers can fuel real-time unified marketing initiatives and drive more profitable customer interactions across all digital touch points. Tealium is the recognized leader in enterprise tag management, and was recently named one of Forbes‘ Most Promising Companies in America for 2014. Each quarter, Tealium serves 1.2 trillion tags on behalf of its global clients, representing an estimated $75 billion in annual online transactions. For more information, please visit http://www.tealium.com.

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Dr. Natalie is a business strategist and a futurist. She has spent her careers looking about how businesses interact with their customers and their employees and she provides companies with the best way to create environments that foster loyatly, motivation and innovation.